21/06/2012

Show of Hands - Museum Patrons

The Devon museum of which Exeter’s Steve Knightley and Phil Beer became patrons last year – and for which they were commissioned to write a special song - has been named 2012 Museum of the Year. Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery has won the £100,000 Art Fund prize. The Victorian city museum re-opened last December after the biggest refurbishment in its 140 year history.

Singer songwriter Knightley was at the museum’s celebratory reopening reception last December when he sang his new song specially commissioned for the occasion Home to a Million Thoughts, mirroring the venue’s new slogan.

Home to a Million Thoughts - Show of Hands

Steve said he was delighted with the museum’s deserved win. “I remember being taken to the museum when I was only about five, because we lived nearby. It obviously made an impression because later I returned there as a courting teenager and more recently I have taken my own son there so things have come full circle and I hope the song sums that up.”

The song, likely to appear on the next Show of Hands album this year, describes Steve’s first connections to the museum:

“Just a boy I wandered through these doors
I found mystery and wonder on each floor
I saw the prey and hunter caught
Those memories can’t be bought
And on days like this I am that child once more…”

Home to a Million Thoughts featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row last week when the programme visited RAMM as one of the short-listed Art Fund Prize venues.

Chairman of the judging panel, Lord Smith of Finsbury, said of the attraction: “The new Royal Albert Memorial Museum is quite simply a magical place. The Victorian aspirations to bring the world to Exeter are stunningly realised through some of the most intelligently considered displays on view in any museum in the UK. At a time when local authority museums are in danger, this brilliant achievement proves how daring, adventurous and important such institutions can be.”